The Karnau Tapes (13 page)

'But on the way home to Nikolassee, where the woods are, isn't it dangerous there?'

'No, of course not. Why do you ask?'

'Not even when it gets dark? Not even if we had to walk home in the evening, all by ourselves?'

'But you never have to do that. You're home from school long before it gets dark.'

'But for instance, if Conni came over so we could play with our boats down by the lake, and if she went home too late because we forgot to look at the time?'

'Conni? The girl in your class, you mean?'

'That's right, my friend Conni.'

'Her parents have moved house, I'm afraid. She won't be there next term.'

'But she still lives at Nikolassee, surely? Or have they moved to Schwanenwerder, near us?'

'No, not there either. Their new home is miles away. Too far away for Conni to attend your school.'

'So we won't be able to see each other any more?'

'I rather doubt it.'

'Oh .. . But why didn't she tell me?'

'You were down in the South for so long. How could she have told you?'

Papa lights a cigarette and opens the book of fairy-tales. Soon we won't have any friends left at all, so many have already gone, evacuated from Berlin because of the air raids. 'Come closer, the two of you,' Papa says, 'my cigarette smoke will keep the midges away.' And he starts reading.

*

I've been firmly convinced, ever since I was a boy, that even the dead can hear. It is an established fact that, although many bodily functions and processes cease abruptly after death, some do not. If a cadaver continues to be galvanised for a time by certain uncontrolled nervous impulses, why shouldn't it also be receptive to acoustic impressions, albeit possibly of a random nature? The ears, after all, are still completely intact. We close a dead person's eyes, but the ears remain exposed. The slowly cooling corpse may lie there motionless but still alert to individual sounds in its vicinity. It may not perceive them quite as clearly as it did when alive they may be intermittent or overlaid with a hiss that steadily increases in volume as decay sets in and generates internal noises; as the bodily fluids cease to flow and the lungs are slowly eaten away, as the stomach is attacked by incipient putrefaction and gastric acids begin to digest the human frame itself.

So a dead man can still, for a while, detect the muted voices of those around him — doctors, relations, and so forth because the latter cast caution to the winds in the belief that he has long since entered the hereafter. They debate the cause of death and discuss funeral arrangements — they may even express relief at his passing. Though incapable of joining in their conversation, the dead man can still hear all of this. And then, quite suddenly, the voices and the hiss die away.

This will form the concluding part of my lecture at the Dresden symposium. I plan to speak without notes, so plenty of rehearsals will be needed. It's a good idea, I feel, to end the lecture without a sample recording and leave the delegates to file out in sudden silence. The sample recordings . . . They're the trickiest problem, because I must select them with such care that they simply cannot fail to impress. After all, apart from my vocal maps and my daring final hypothesis, they're the high point of the entire lecture. Which items in my vast collection will be most appropriate to the occasion?

These tapes and discs are all I have left. I was fired soon after my return from the front. Several hundred metres of tape were missing, that's what did it. They refused to believe me when I said I'd lost them in the turmoil out there. That was the official explanation, but my head of department obviously guessed what really lay behind the story of the missing tapes — or, at least, he hinted as much when he said goodbye. Certain rumours had come to his ears, he said, but he couldn't bring himself to credit them. 'Unsavoury' was the word he used in this connection.

Had he been tipped off by colleagues of mine after one of them caught me in the cutting-room one night, evaluating some death rattles? Could he even have heard, in a roundabout way, of what happened during one of my absences from home? Alarmed by a smell of putrefaction on the stairs, my neighbours summoned the police in the belief that my apartment contained a days-old, rotting corpse, but all that came to light were some half-dissected pigs' heads on the kitchen table. I had inadvertently left them lying there because my departure was so hurried that I'd had no time to feed the scraps to Coco.

My call-up papers arrived a few days later. They came as a shock. It was less the possibility of death that scared me — my sojourn at the front had already brought me face to face with that as a civilian — than the prospect of being plunged, willy-nilly, into the world of male togetherness, with its stench of sweat and coarse jokes, with all the things that made my gorge rise even as a boy.

My sole recourse was to request an interview with the children's father, who heard me out when I told him of my predicament and, in return for my having looked after his offspring, agreed to help. He kept his word: my invitation to Dresden can only have been his doing.

*

Mama has sent us to see Papa at his office. 'He's bound to be pleased if you pay him a surprise visit,' she said. Papa isn't as busy as usual, he can take us to the zoo — Hilde, Helmut and me. But we're told to wait in the outer office, it seems he's busy after all. Maybe he's on the telephone, or having a private conversation with an important visitor. It's strictly forbidden to walk into Papa's office without being asked, so we're made to sit on the sofa outside. He's in conference, the receptionist says.

At last we can go in. Papa's office is done up in red, all the chairs and his desk are covered with red leather. He's sitting at the desk, smoking. 'Well, my dears, how are you? Finished your homework?'

There's no one in the office he could have been in conference with. Maybe his visitor went out through the door into the next room, and from there out into the passage. The door isn't shut, it's only ajar. Helmut sits on Papa's lap and plays with his fountain pen. Papa stubs out his cigarette. 'This
is
a nice surprise,' he says. 'Where shall we go, the zoo?'

He's already lit another cigarette. He isn't half as pleased to see us as he makes out, I can tell from the look in his eyes and the wrinkles around his nose. Perhaps it was a tiring conference. Helmut is jabbing the blotter with the fountain pen. 'Stop that,' Papa says, 'you'll only make a mess.'

'It's green, Papa, the ink.'

'Yes, and you'll end by getting it all over your nice clean shirt.'

'I like green ink.'

'And look at your hands. Careful now, we'll go and wash them.'

There's a sudden movement in the room next door: I see a lady through the crack, but only for a moment. She moves so quickly, her necklace catches the sunlight. Hilde says, 'Papa, will we have to go straight home after the zoo?'

The door to the passage closes quietly. What was she doing here, that lady? Did Hilde see her too? No, definitely not, she's looking at Papa, who's keeping hold of Helmut's hands to stop him making an even bigger mess. 'Come on, you two,' he says. 'We'll wash Helmut's grubby paws and then we'll go, right away.'

'Papa, when you have visitors in your office . . .'

'Yes, Helga, what about it?'

'Oh, nothing.'

'You mean because you had to wait just now?'

'Yes.'

'Were you getting bored out there?'

'Yes, a bit.’

*

A human figure in plastic? A tangle of electric wires? I can't make it out in the gloom, not at first. All that illuminates the big room's pale blue ceiling, high overhead, is some concealed lighting. A curtain at the other end, its drapery disturbed, rustles and billows out on either side. The whole wall of fabric stirs, red as an oral cavity, red as the rest of the decor. Now the thing begins to rotate on its own axis, there in the centre of the room. Lights start flashing, red lines, then blue: convoluted neon tubes with a big red blob pulsating in their midst. It's clearly recognisable now: a human body in outline with its arms raised, every organ lit up in a different colour. Meanwhile, in a businesslike tone, a recorded voice reads out information relating to human anatomy. Apart from that, silence. The neon tubes faintly illuminate a row of marvelling faces: an entire class of schoolchildren lined up in front of the 'Glass Man'. Every part of him glows, the only unlit component being his larynx.

So these are the exhibition rooms of the Museum of Hygiene, but where's the lecture hall? I lose my way in the labyrinthine building, wander through a series of cellars in which pipes mounted at eye-level drip with condensation. It's chilly down here. Through an open door and into a basement store-room. The lights are on, revealing shelves laden with boxes, and there's a woman sitting at the back — she's bound to be able to direct me. But it isn't a woman, just a plaster torso painted in true-to-life colours: smooth, pink skin, rouge, lipstick, bobbed hair. The girl who's smiling at me even has retractable eyelids and mascaraed eyelashes. The eyes are so lifelike, I failed to notice at first that her arms and legs are missing.

Suspended from the shelves are some Wagnerian heads, heroic plaster casts in
mezzo-rilievo.
Flowing locks, grimacing faces, mouths open as if hallooing or singing. What's in those black boxes? Cautiously, I take one off the shelf. Visible through the glass top is a repulsive spectacle, the head of a baby with its eyes shut, the whole nose an open wound. A freshly prepared specimen? A realistic imitation? The box bears a handwritten inscription: 'Congenital Syphilis'. I get the picture now: these are specimens moulded in wax, pathological conditions copied from live patients for the edification of medical students. I peer into a dusty cardboard box: another head, this one swathed in bandages with only the mouth exposed and the protruding tongue a mass of blisters. And here is a head cut in half to reveal a longitudinal section of the organs of speech and the throat, life-size. I can see the bisected larynx and the vocal cords stretched taut between the flaps of flesh that have been clamped apart for better visibility.

Strange. I conduct my solitary research at home with pigs' and horses' heads, devote years of intensive study to the apparatus of speech, and all at once, in an unfamiliar setting, I'm confronted by a similar collection. Waxworks. Of human beings, though, not animals. Could it be that, without my knowing it, others have long been pursuing my own line of inquiry?

I walk on, passing hand studies, cranial casts, facial fragments, fleshy excrescences, deformities, cleft palates, pockmarked cheeks. The subterranean store-room is bigger than I thought. Stretched out on a slab is a patient's body cast
in toto,
face contorted and mouth gaping in a silent scream as a length of bone is removed from his open thigh.

Beside it lies another simulacrum: a human leg, swollen and suppurating after several days without medical treatment.

'Anyone there?'

No sign of life. At the far end of the cellar are a bust of the Führer and two genuine skeletons, one of a dwarf and the other of a foetus. Also lying there are some moulds, shapeless lumps of plaster cut in half and strung together. Inside will be cavities, negative impressions of complete human heads in the round.

'Better late than never,' someone says. 'You're the last to arrive.' It must be Professor Sievers, who's chairing this conference on speech hygiene.

*

At the zoo we always visit the flamingos first. We like to see if they're still pink, but we can't understand how they get to be that colour. I wonder who that lady was, the one who was visiting Papa. She wasn't a secretary, she must have been a girl-friend. I'm sure Papa's got a girl-friend he meets secretly, at the office. Or at Lanke. That's why he spends the night there so often, and that's why we haven't had a new brother or sister for so long. Helmut gives a sudden squeal. 'Ugh, what are those horrible worms?'

We look where he's pointing. Papa looks into the enclosure too. 'Don't be silly,' he says, 'it's only food for the birds.'

'They won't get eaten alive, will they?'

Papa laughs. 'Of course they will, Hilde. Unless you'd like to rescue them and show them off in a cage of their own.'

Mama doesn't want any more children from Papa, that's all. Or doesn't she know about his lady-friend? Maybe she'd really like some more children but she can't have any. It's no fun today, the zoo. After the birds, the others insist on going to see the big cats. They keep on at me till we do. I wonder if the lady in Papa's office has any children. I only saw her for a moment, with the necklace dangling between her breasts. She's got breasts like Heide's wet-nurse when Heide was still being breast-fed. The wet-nurse would unbutton her blouse and take out one breast, just one. Heide's head almost hid it, but sometimes, when she'd finished feeding Heide and didn't do up her buttons fast enough, you could just see her nipple, all red and wet and pointy. The leopards are lying in the shade, dozing. How hot it looks, the black panther's fur, and how glossy it is.

There are some steps going down to a cellar. They're dark, and Helmut is the only one brave enough to go down them, but they don't seem to lead anywhere. He rattles the door, but it's locked. I bet there aren't any animals inside.

They're feeding the lions now. The keeper throws some lumps of red meat through the bars. The lion eats first, the lioness goes on lying in the corner, but she doesn't take her eyes off the meat. I can't remember now if I really saw that lady's breasts or the tuft of dark hair between her legs, or the pale stripes on her skin where the shoulder straps go, pale like her string of pearls. The opera singer who used to visit us sometimes, she wore a string of pearls like that. The way that lion is worrying his meat! Bits of it come flying through the bars, so Papa makes us step back.

She was funny, the opera singer. She always spent ages shaking hands with Papa, and she spoke to us children in a smarmy kind of way, like: 'Hello, my dears, you're far, far prettier than you look in your pictures in the paper.' She smiled all the time and laughed at everything Papa said. The lion is backing away with the meat between his paws. We've seen enough for today.